MINNESOTA
Nick Coleman
Posted by Nick Coleman on Dec 16, 2013
That derisive laughter you heard Sunday was the response of many Twin Cities Catholics to Archbishop John Nienstedt’s pre-Christmas “apology” for letting down his flock — again. As reported by local media with a straight face, Nienstedt’s humbug homily was supposed to be taken as an effort to come clean by a guy who seems to have missed the past 30-year history of efforts to rein in sexual abuse in the Church. Nienstedt’s words weren’t an apology; they were just another cover up. This time, it was his own back end he was trying to cover.
This was an attempt to pass the buck for a lack of due diligence by a church leader who came to the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis in 2007 with a very specific agenda in mind — an agenda that was not focused on protecting the most vulnerable members of the church but on destroying the liberal bent of an archdiocese that some in Rome — including former Pope Benedict XVI — wanted to quash. Nienstedt, appointed by Benedict to replace the liberal Archbishop Harry Flynn, was just the man for the job. He already had smashed the liberal legacy of the late bishop of the Diocese of New Ulm, Minn., Raymond Lucker, who strongly supported women in the church and recommended that married men be eligible for ordination. In St. Paul, Nienstedt wasted no time cracking down on dissenters in the Twin Cities church, his actions largely focused against gays and homosexual support groups: He supported an outfit that claimed to be able to “cure” gay Catholocs, refused Communion to gay activists, ordered St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis to cease holding a “Rainbow Mass” during Twin Cities Pride week and even wrote a cranky letter to the University of Notre Dame opposing the school’s decision to invite “anti-Catholic” gay rights supporter Barack Obama to speak. At one point, the bully in the pulpit even told an anguished mom that she better be careful about supporting her gay child or she could end up in hell.
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